Rem Koolhaas

Preservation is Overtaking Us

We were lucky in 2002 to receive a commission from the

Beijing government that enabled us to try to investigate and
define for China a specific form of preservation. This is one of
those unique moments in which we come closer, and maybe I
should say in this case that I come closer, to one of my most
intimate utopian dreams, which is to find an architecture that
does nothing. I’ve always been appalled that abstinence is the
one part of the architectural repertoire that is never consid-
ered. Perhaps in architecture, a profession that fundamentally
is supposed to change things it encounters (usually before
reflection), there ought to be an equally important arm of it
which is concerned with not doing anything. To the extent that
this may sound like I am coveting an appointment in
[Columbia’s] historic preservation department, it may not be
far off.
What we started to do is look at preservation in general
and look at a little bit at the history of preservation. Now, the
first law of preservation ever defined was in 1790, just a few
years after the French Revolution. That is already an interest-
ing idea, that at the moment in France when the past was
basically being prepared for the rubbish dump, the issue of
preserving monuments was raised for the first time. Another
equally important moment was in 1877 where, in Victorian
England in the most intense moment of civilization, there was
the second preservation condition. If you look at inventions
that were taking place between these two moments—cement,
the spinning frame, the stethoscope, anesthesia, photography,
blueprint, etc.—you slowly realize that preservation is not
the enemy of modernity but actually one of its inventions.
That makes perfect sense because clearly the whole idea of
modernization raises either latently or overtly the issue of
what to keep.
We then looked at the history of preservation in terms of
what was being preserved, and it started logically enough with
ancient monuments, then religious buildings, etc. Later, struc-
tures with more and more (and also less and less) sacred sub-
stance and more and more sociological substance were pre-
served, to the point that we now preserve concentration
camps, department stores, factories and amusement rides. In
Future Anterior
Volume 1, Number 2 other words, everything we inhabit is potentially susceptible
Fall 2004 to preservation. That was another important discovery: the
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 scale of preservation escalates relentlessly to include entire
landscapes, and there is now even a campaign to preserve
part of the moon as our most important site.
Then, we started looking at the interval or the distance
between the present and what was preserved. In 1818, that
was 2,000 years. In 1900, it was only 200 years. And now, near
the 1960s, it became twenty years. We are living in an incredi-
bly exciting and slightly absurd moment, namely that preser-
vation is overtaking us. Maybe we can be the first to actually
experience the moment that preservation is no longer a
retroactive activity but becomes a prospective activity. This
makes perfect sense because it is clear that we built so much
mediocrity that it is literally threatening our lives. Therefore,
we will have to decide in advance what we are going to build
for posterity sooner or later. Actually, this seems an absurd
hypothesis, but it has happened, for instance, in the cases of
some houses that were preserved at the moment they were
finished, putting the inhabitants in a very complex conun-
drum.
We then started to look how to apply this to the issue of
preservation. Of course, preservation is also dominated by the
lobby of authenticity, ancientness, and beauty, but that is, of
course, a very limited conception of preservation. We started
to conceive and imagine that you could perhaps impose upon
the entire center of Beijing a kind of bar code and declare that
the bands in the bar code could either be preserved forever or
systematically scraped. In such a case, you would have the

2. Table showing the relationship

of the invention of modern preserva-
tion to other modern inventions.
(Courtesy of the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture)

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3. With an enforcement of a “bar code”
upon the center of Beijing, one can
argue that the bands in the “bar code”
can either be preserved for eternity or
razed. (Courtesy of the Office for
Metropolitan Architecture)

certainty that you preserved everything in a very democratic,

dispassionate way—highways, Chinese monuments, bad
things, good things, ugly things, mediocre things—and there-
fore really maintained an authentic condition. Also, you could
begin to plan the city in terms of a kind of phasing. In all the
cities that now are almost suffocatingly stable in the center
and alarmingly unstable in the periphery, you could introduce
a new condition of phasing where sooner or later any part of
the city would be eliminated to be replaced by other stuff. You
could project and plan over almost millennia to generate a sit-
uation in which each part of the city would always confront its
opposite in a kind of complementary condition.

Editor’s note
This article is the transcription of part of a talk delivered by Rem Koolhaas at
Columbia University on September 17th, 2004. The editors would like to thank Mr.
Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture for the permission to print it.

Author biography
Rem Koolhaas teaches the course “Practice of Architecture and Urban Design” at
Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. He is a world-renowned architect
in practice since 1975, when he founded the now-legendary Office for Metropolitan
Architecture. His projects include civic, governmental, and residential work in
Europe, North America, and Asia. More recently, Koolhaas started a company called
AMO, which is dedicated to the application of architectural thinking to questions
of organization, identity, and culture.

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1. Wayne Thiebaud’s “Potrero Hill,” 1976. (Courtesy of the artist)